Converting a List of Vertices to GDSII

Consider the requirement to convert a list of polygon vertices into a GDSII file. For the moment, let us assume that the vertices are ordered and that no illegal polygons are included -- that is, the list provides them in the proper order needed to circumscribe a boundary without self intersection (we will discuss the non-ordered case later ...)

The list may come from a variety of applications - for example, a routine that scans an IC mask, detects the edges and outputs the vertices of the edges or from a Visual Basic program that generates shapes from user provided parameters.

Step 1 - Formatting the Vertex List

The first step is to format the vertex list into the ASCII format accepted by Artwork's ASCII2GDS program. (Of course, one could write a custom program that accepts the list format directly, but we would prefer to "bolt" together existing tools ...)

An example of Artwork's ASCII format is shown below along with annotations in italics: